Come Back,
Little Sheba

Come Back, Little Sheba
By William Inge

If you can’t forget the past, you stay in it and never get out.

American playwright William Inge has been called the playwright who dramatized the “plain, sometimes desperate lives” in the heartland of America. Director and critic Harold Clurman called Inge “our dramatist of the ordinary … His writing is bare but suggestive. At times it touches the rim of poetry, and the right actors can transport it into that realm.” He had a string of Broadway hits through the 1950s including Come Back, Little Sheba (1950), Picnic (1953), Bus Stop (1955) and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1957). Picnic won a Pulitzer Prize and his first screenplay, Splendor in the Grass, won him an Oscar. Then why isn’t Inge’s name and work as recognized and celebrated as that of his contemporaries Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams? It seems that his plays went out of fashion for a time – his quiet studies of Midwestern disillusionment seen as quaint or somehow too tidy, too quiet. But in recent years, it seems his work is being re-discovered for their delicate portraits of ordinary people – the Shaw Festival has produced both Picnic and Bus Stop – and this season we’re presenting this play which launched his career.

The play looks at the lives of Doc and Lola, a couple married for twenty years, living in a cluttered house in a semi-respectable neighbourhood in an unnamed Midwestern city. Lola can’t stop thinking about, dreaming about, and talking to anyone who will listen about her missing dog, Sheba. She enters the play having woken up from a dream about it, and her patient husband answers all of her questions about the dog. Again. Yes, she was cute. Yes, he remembers her fluffy white coat. But maybe Sheba just should never have grown old. That she’ll now be a puppy to them forever. Once Doc leaves for work, and Marie, their pretty young boarder, has left for school, Lola is alone again – so she seeks out the neighbour to talk about Sheba, but she has no time to talk. “You should get busy and forget her. You should get busy, Mrs Delaney.”

What Lola does busy herself with is the love life of their young boarder, Marie. She becomes the focus for both Lola and Doc as she seems to be able live the life of freedom they could not. Lola recounts one night how she and Doc met while they were still in high school: she was the “it” girl who, out of all of her suitors, chose the shy Doc. When she got pregnant, they married and Doc’s plans to become a doctor were cut short. Marie’s relationship with the bold athlete Turk, intrigue and disturb them both. She explains to Lola that her sensible boyfriend back home knows about Turk, but both have agreed that neither need to be lonely while they’re apart. Doc and Lola are shocked by this and it makes them reflect on their own past, their own relationship and the disappointments and compromises they had to make, leading to a heartbreaking but inevitable confrontation of both their past and their future.

What is so compelling about this play is not the action or the story necessarily, but the characters and Inge’s sensitive and complex portraits of people living in small towns, struggling perhaps but not without hope. Directed by Artistic Director Jackie Maxwell, the production features Corrine Koslo as Lola and Ric Reid as Doc.